We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, December 29, 2013

A manifesto for independent media

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

The author from this revolutionary collective sees the crucial necessity for an independent media if there is to be any hope of escaping the rapidly developing dystopia of capitalism. Any victories we achieve can only come about by breaking the corporate media and conventional academic lenses that prevent us from seeing our way out of this dark cave of despair and doom.
...if we don’t find ways to connect our various national struggles by articulating a global critique of the capitalist world-system and a radical vision of a post-capitalist society, we will be forever doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
He insists that the tools and the material are available for us to construct an alternative to the mind numbing and distorting views of capitalist disinformation. It is time for the construction to begin. 
Only by collectively constructing our own autonomous nodes and networks of communication, only by generating our own participatory platforms to mediate other ways of seeing things, other ways of engaging with the world around us, can we liberate ourselves from the mental incarceration forced upon us by those in power.
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